Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives from August 2007
The media is silent, Congress is absent, and Americans are distracted as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran. US Navy aircraft carrier strike forces are deployed off Iran. US Air Force jets and missile systems are deployed in bases...
We must move our nation beyond fossil fuels. But let’s not be suckered by the promoters of biofuel alternatives like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel. Large companies that stand to reap billions in subsidies and tax breaks from these energy "sour...
I sit here stunned: a goofy smile on my face, a tear on my cheek. This must be what victory feels like. Forgive me if I’m not familiar with its near-narcotic euphoria. For folks who haven’t heard, Kenneth Foster’s death sentence was struck...
Former CIA Analyst Why do I feel like the proverbial skunk at a Labor Day picnic? Sorry; but I thought you might want to know that this time next year there will probably be more skunks than we can handle. I fear our country is likely to be at war with Iran-an...
A rising chorus of business gurus is singing the praises of a new solution to the U.S. auto industry’s ongoing crisis: one big health care trust for all the Big 3′s workers. According to the proposal’s cheerleaders, by making giant one-time pay-i...
Does anyone remember corporate ethics? This was the big economic issue after the collapse of Enron, WorldCom and other major companies at the beginning of the 21st century. Books were cooked, winks and nods acknowledged. Enron and WorldCom used a range of ...
The Government Accountability Office has confirmed the obvious: the "benchmarks" the U.S. Congress set out to assess progress in the Iraq war will not be met by a September deadline. Unfortunately, it turns out that Iraq is making major strides in...
A new grassroots lobbying effort headed by former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher is running a series of "pro-war" videos to support military operations in Iraq. While I sympathize with all who have served, suffered, and/or died during th...
I am not going to the protest. I am tired of protests: they don’t stop wars. Not protests that are mostly about sign waving and hooking up with friends and strangers and feeling the solidarity and then going back to work or school on Monday. They say the def...
Plus ça change. Markets are turbulent, Iraq is disintegrating, and we still have time for a dead Princess. Or so we can assume when looking at some of the commemorative gush that is streaming out ten years after Diana’s death. Not even Winston Churchi...
In three months, the G20 group of major financial powers will join us in South Africa, hosted near Cape Town by the gregarious finance minister Trevor Manuel. As usual the ministers will wine and dine, and protesters will suck teargas. But elite self-congra...
Behind every great fortune lies a great crime. That was Balzac. Update to Balzac — behind every great political issue lies a corporate crime. Take water, for example. For centuries, water was part of the commonwealth. Then ...
Mexico City. Mexico’s 56.000.000 hectares of lush forestland covering a quarter of its national territory and comprising 1.3% of the world’s forest resources, are increasingly littered with the corpses of dead forest defenders. With the ...
The Sierra Club accelerated its plunge to environmental irrelevancy, firmly cementing its role as Democratic Party lapdog by awarding its highest award, the John Muir Award, to Carbon Off-set magnate, Al Gore, Jr. The club announced this year’s awar...
A good friend and former Professor of mine always began his classes on the developing world with an introduction to Islam. One of the first points driven home in the class, semester after semester, was the difference between Islam and Arabic. While the terms are o...
The Jeff Gannon Affair drew our attention to the fact that a male prostitute with minimal journalistic credentials can spend many hours in the White House on days when there were no press briefings, with the Secret Service log of his comings and goings mysteriousl...
Leaving a government job for the private sector used to mean an end to pressure, accountability and visibility. But not for former Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) administrator, Dr. W. Ron DeHaven, the Department of Agriculture’s top veter...
Hi Ho. Hi Ho. It’s off to Washington, D.C. we go. For another demonstration at the seat of power. But hold on a minute. This fall and winter, the road to the seat of power goes through Iowa with its first in the nation presidential caucus. Let...
As good news continues to flow from the "surge" — some of it true, some of it false and all of it spun — it is easy to forget the bottom line. The bottom line is whether or not we are beginning to see the re-emergence of a state in Iraq. Thre...
One more Republican conservative was outed this week for his illicit sexual conduct. "Roll Call," the newspaper that covers Capitol Hill, broke the story that Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct for soliciting a ...
"Was it wrong to try to get the city back on its feet as quickly as possible?" an exasperated Christine Todd Whitman asked members of Congress. The occasion was Whitman’s first appearance before the House subcommittee investigating her handling of ...
The Iraqi government is struggling to overcome opposition at home and abroad as more than one million Shia pilgrims brave sniper fire to converge on the holy city of Kerbala for a religious festival. The immense pilgrimage is, in effect, a show of strength ...
On NPR’s
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In 1882, New York clamored for an appearance by the champion of laissez-faire capitalism, Herbert Spencer, who provided Charles Darwin with the phrase, "Survival of the fittest." Spencer agreed to meet the captains of American industry, but his ap...
So far, environmentalists have been silent on economic and political calamities tied to the housing bust. One could not expect otherwise. Environmentalists may be natural conservatives, but they are not natural capitalists. The way forward is first of all t...